Re: Open Systems closed to Ada?

[alex@MIMSY.CS.UMD.EDU (Alex Blakemore)]

In article <1992Dec1.230732.13822@fcom.cc.utah.edu> val@news.ccutah.edu (Val Ka
rtchner) writes:
> Ada and C++ have been growing together in capabilities
> Remember when the Ada community thought that "object orientedness" was a
> Bad Thing?  Now that it will be available in Ada 9X, it is a Good Thing

many Ada advocates never claimed OO to be bad - and wished Ada supported it.
To be fair, when Ada was designed OOP was not as well understood as today, and
including it in Ada83 may have been the straw that broke the compilers back
(or in the case of many Unix compilers, 

It is interesting to see so much of Ada's good ideas show up in languages
like C++, Eiffel and others (.e.g NeXT's extension to ObjC includes exceptions 
that
act just like Ada exceptions except they can carry arguments too)
On the surface, it seems that C++ added a lot more from Ada to C than
Ada9x will add to Ada83 from C++.

> I have always liked a few things about Ada, but I don't like
> the baggage that comes along with it.

in an attempt to resurrect something interesting from this thread,
what baggage do you refer to (and what do you like)?

is the baggage something wrong in the language, available compilers/tools,
or something sociological?  please try to be specific so we Ada advocates
can better understand why people resist the one true way :) :) :)

I agree that the mandate may seem draconian but remember the Dod's original
goal with Ada was and is to eliminate the tower of Babbel.  Even the C communit
y
has found standardization critical.  I wish Dod would put alot more emphasis on
the carrot though.
-- 
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Alex Blakemore alex@cs.umd.edu   NeXT mail accepted